
Source: My Name is Red
Source: Tao Te Ching, Ch. 6, as interpreted by Stephen Mitchell (1992)
Source: My Name is Red
spirituality and consciousness
“The pride of any mother is to give birth to a responsible and successful child.”
Quoted in: Kabir, Hajara Muhammad (2010). Northern women development. [Nigeria]. ISBN 978-978-906-469-4. OCLC 890820657
Works, Pride and Prejudice
The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness (2004)
Context: We are, the great spiritual writers insist, most fully ourselves when we give ourselves away, and it is egotism that holds us back from that transcendent experience that has been called God, Nirvana, Brahman, or the Tao.
What I now realize, from my study of the different religious traditions, is that a disciplined attempt to go beyond the ego brings about a state of ecstasy. Indeed, it is in itself ekstasis. Theologians in all the great faiths have devised all kinds of myths to show that this type of kenosis, or self-emptying, is found in the life of God itself. They do not do this because it sounds edifying, but because this is the way that human nature seems to work. We are most creative and sense other possibilities that transcend our ordinary experience when we leave ourselves behind.
“I dream of giving birth to a child who will ask,
Mother, what was war?”